Your ideas are hugely valuable.

--S.B., Orinda, CA, novelist

“The endeavor of writing can be long and lonely. Mary Carroll Moore, master writing instructor, to the rescue! Moore packs How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book with years of gritty good sense and big-picture perspective. Her techniques for drafting, organizing, and polishing a book are practical and time-tested. Here is a first-time book-writer’s best companion.”

--Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew,author of Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir

If I could implement all I've learned from you, I'd have a best-seller!

Pretend you’re a reporter for the New York Times. You’re going to interview your book idea.

List some questions you’d love to ask your book about its form, content, goals. You can start with something nonthreatening, as you would if you were a real reporter.

Ask your book some very good questions. Some ideas from my class are below, or you can make up your own:

What do you want to tell me about yourself?What form suits you best?Who is your readership and how will theyaccess you?What are you most eager to say?What are you most afraid to say?What genre are you?

When it runs out of things to say (or you getnervous about the answers) ask a different question.

The goal of this book-writing exercise is to surprise yourself. You’ll tap the hidden parts of yourself as a writer, the parts we often censor. You can strike gold--if you maintain the attitude of no-assumptions and anything can happen.

Books for the Blocked--These'll Get You Moving Again!

Escaping into the Open by Elizabeth Berg

Listen to Me by Lynn Lauber

Marry Your Muse by Jan Phillips

Pencil Dancing by Mari Messer

The Art of Slow Writing by Louise DeSalvo

Thinking about Memoir by Abigail Thomas

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.Albert Camus

Friday, February 12, 2016

Skilled
writers use sensory details to bring emotion to the reader. Oddly
enough, emotion doesn't come from fast-paced action. Our hearts may
race, we may read fast, but all we feel is tension and speed.
Characters' thoughts and feelings don't bring emotion to the reader
either. We may relate, but it doesn't hit that part of the brain where
memories reside, where our emotions slide past the logical mind.

Sensory
details tap into our reptilian brain, the part that responds without
filter by any logic. Smells and sounds are often the most evocative of
sensory details in writing. A great example: this opening paragraph of Janet Fitch's acclaimed novel, White Oleander: "The
Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the
spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived,
their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could
not sleep in the hot, dry nights, my mother and I." Can you sense the danger in those images? She keeps it short and sharp. The words hot, shriveling, poisonous, dagger
work with the senses of touch, texture, taste, and sight. Quite a lot
packed into a short three lines. And then, we get the people. Who
could not sleep. Something really bad is going to happen . . . and it
does.

But how do you use sensory details in your own writing? How many is enough, how much is too much?

Two Kinds of Sensory DetailsThe example from White Oleander
uses one kind of sensory detail: external. These descriptions have to
do with the environment of the story. The winds, the desert heat, the
death of everything but poisonous flowers.

Another kind of
sensory detail comes from the internal senses. What a person feels in
her throat as she stares across the room at someone she hates. What
happens on the skin when we read that letter.

External sensory
details are most effective, of the two. You can use more of them
without boring the reader or sounding like you're heavy handed.

Internal
sensory details are trickier. We readers expect them to be
present--they are one way we know what the character is feeling without
being told. Show, don't tell, in other words. "He saw that
his foot was jiggling, tried to stop it" is more effective than just
stating, "He was suddenly nervous."

But they can also become overdone, even cliche.

When to Use Internal Sensory DetailsSensory
details are a pause in the momentum of your story. They ask a reader
to stop for a few seconds and access an emotion. You don't want to do
this a lot. If you do, the story will slowly sink. No forward motion.

But
if you don't add any, readers won't know what a character is
perceiving, feeling, or thinking, without you saying "He felt sad" or
"They sighed, disappointed." (Telling, not showing.)

A thriller
writer wrote me about this. She'd been planting sensory details at peak
emotional moments in her scene, a good change from telling how her
narrator felt. She worked from the simpler ones ("His stomach
clenched.") to more complex and imaginative ("A dull pain gnawed his
stomach."). She even experimented with metaphorical ones: " A worm of
anxiety writhed within her." But was it OK to say a body part did
something it couldn't actually do in real life, like the stomach that
clenched or the chest that froze? Would it be better to say "her chest
felt like it suddenly froze?" I think personally I would avoid using a
detail that the body couldn't do, but I've certainly felt a stomach
clench, so that works for me as a reader. "Ice ran in his veins" is
another one that I see a lot. Not possible, but used!

She tried
to avoid the cliches of "Her heart raced" and "The pit of his stomach
felt hollow" but she was confused about this. Could she use some of
these more ordinary sensory details here and there? Or was it better to
use fewer, and make them more creative? Cliches are just descriptors
that are overused, so they lose their meaning. Always, more original
ones are better (and more work).

She
also wondered how frequently to use them--her average is two or three
every nine pages in a 350 page manuscript. Was that too many for an
intense thriller? For this great question, I would send her
back to her favorite books in her genre. Read a couple of first
chapters of thrillers she likes a lot. Underline or highlight whenever
she sees an internal sensory detail. (She'll need to read like a writer,
not like a reader to see these--they are usually invisible to readers,
in skillful writing.) My copy of The Girl on the Train has about two or three per chapter, about the average she's going for. In certain chapters, there are more. Look
at a couple of books. Get an average you can live with. See what
these writers use for sensory details--do they go for the complex or the
simple. Problem is, there's no hard-and-fast rule. Most
writers develop an intuitive sense about sensory details, based on their
genre and audience. Literary writers use more than writers working in
commercial fiction.

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Upcoming Writing Classes with Mary

Whether you are trying to write the story of your life for publication or as a family legacy, this class by the author of two memoirs will show you how to organize your stories into readable, interesting work. You'll be introduced to a simple formula that successful authors use to find the central conflict of their story, then plan, organize, and write scenes and chapters around it. We'll explore the value of themes, how action and reflection balance one another in memoir and creative nonfiction, and authorial voice versus narrative voice. $105. Click here for details or to register.Writing RetreatsYour Book Starts Here: Week-long Writing Retreat July 30-August 3, Madeline Island School of the Arts, Lake Superior Five days of workshop, personal coaching, and plenty of time to work on your book in our great community of book writers at all stages, working in all genres, on gorgeous Madeline Island off the coast of northern Wisconsin. This retreat will become a highlight of your summer. Great meals and lodging on campus. $775. Click here for details.

Independent Study for Book Writers July 30-August 3, Madeline Island School of the Arts, Lake Superior Craving time, quiet, and a wonderful space to finally get working (or finishing) your book? But enough support each day, plus community, to do it sanely and safely? Five days of personal coaching, plenty of time to write, and optional workshops to attend make this independent study week productive, creative bliss. Great meals and lodging on campus. $775. Click here for details.

A Little about Me . . .

Mary Carroll Moore is an award-winning, internationally published author of thirteen books in three genres, writing teacher, editor and book doctor for publishing houses. For thirty years she's helped thousands of new and experienced writers plan, write, and develop--and publish!--their books. Photo by Bruce Fuller Photography.

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If you believe you have a book inside you just waiting to come out, here is a guide that will ensure your book’s arrival in the world. In clear, accessible prose, Mary Carroll Moore leads the aspiring author through every step of the challenging, rewarding process of developing and completing a full-length book.

--Rebecca McClanahan, author of Word Painting

Encouraging Words--Well-Known Writers with Large Number of Rejections--But Published!

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo--397 rejections (and it became a movie)A Wrinkle in Timeby Madeleine L'Engle--97 rejections (and it won the Newbery Medal for best children's book of 1963; it's now in its 69th printing)Cinder Edna by Ellen Jackson--40 rejections (and it has won multiple awards and sold 150,000 hard copies). Judy Blume says she received "nothing but rejections" for 2 years.Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot--17 rejectionsHarry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling--rejected by 9 publishersThe Diary of Anne Frank--16 rejections (and now more than 30 million copies are in print)Dr. Seuss books--more than 15 rejectionsJonathan Livingston Seagullby Richard Bach--140 rejectionsGone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell--38 rejectionsWatership Down by Richard Adams--26 rejectionsDune by Frank Herbert--nearly 20 rejections

To all book writers: Believe in your story. Keep trying. The right home for your book is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

Want to get the creative brain going?

Book writers (and any writers) need to know how to engage the creative right brain that "writes" in images. Think of any wonderful book that's left you swimming in a setting or characters--the writer has successfully used the image-creating part of the brain. But our normal workaday lives short-circuit this part. Check out this cool video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist at Harvard Medical School, recounting her personal experience of a left-brain stroke and her awakening to right-brain reality. Pretty amazing fusion of brain science with what it feels like to a brain scientist having a stroke:http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Flying Squirrels Bring Creative Jolt to Novelist

Flying squirrel gets into house--disrupts routine, gets novelist thinking differently. This happened to me! For two days, as I chased the squirrel (actually, it was all night since they are nocturnal), I slept very little. And got many new ideas for my novel-in-progress.Go figure!Maybe...book writers need creative jolts? Routine dulls our imaginations? How has an unexpected interruption actually been a gift for your creativity this week?

At the Loft Literary Center, I can always tell which students in my classes have taken Mary Carroll Moore’s class on book-writing. They talk about writing their book in "islands" and using storyboards to figure out how those sections relate to each other. When another student confesses to feeling overwhelmed by the material her memoir might include, they readily advise, “You should try Mary Carroll Moore’s method.” I second that.--Cheri Register, author of Packinghouse Daughter and American Book Award winner

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